Australia/Israel Review

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence: A Concise History
by Steven R. Ward
Georgetown University Press, 2024, 232 pp., A$52.30

Iran has been in our eyes and ears throughout the last year. Its direct and open confrontation with Israel has marked a substantial change from the clandestine shadow war that has been ongoing since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

Steven R. Ward’s book Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence: A Concise History provides the background to the events of 2024. It is a systematic retelling of Iran’s intelligence operations over four decades, concluding with the beginning of the war against Hamas.

Its author, a CIA analyst for 35 years, presents a factual and unemotional account, based on open-source material, of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS).

Formally founded in August 1983, MOIS was estimated to employ up to 30,000 personnel in 2012 and to operate through a probable eight directorates. Many of its operatives studied at Imam Baqir University before entering its service.

The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, referred to MOIS as “the unknown soldiers of the Hidden Imam.” This referred to the 12th Imam, concealed in the present, but who would return as a messiah to lead the final battle between “good” and “evil”.

Its predecessor, the Shah’s SAVAK, was disbanded on the eve of Khomeini’s return to Iran. Yet Khomeini in exile had been insightful enough to cultivate quiet contacts with SAVAK officers in preparation for the new regime’s determination to ruthlessly destroy its ideological opposition both within and abroad. Within a few months of Khomeini’s return, revolutionary tribunals had passed death sentences on 83 former SAVAK officers.

By the end of 1979, Khomeini’s operatives had assassinated the Shah’s nephew in Paris. In the summer of 1980, Daoud Salahuddin, formerly known as David Belfield, posing as a postman, fired three bullets into Ali Akbar Tabatabaei, a known critic of Khomeini, at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. Allegedly paid $5,000 to kill Tabatabaei, Belfield, an American convert to Islam, arrived in Teheran a week later.

This set the pattern for the Iranian regime’s global campaign to ensure its survival and its arena of influence. The author notes MOIS’s complicity in human rights abuses in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria a decade ago. Morality was never a consideration.

As the author notes, at the end of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and shortly before his death, Khomeini issued a fatwa resulting in the execution of thousands of his domestic opponents. The far Left in Europe looked the other way as Iranian socialists were pushed into Khomeini’s meat grinder.

Free of conflict, Teheran immediately struck up a friendship with Hamas – despite its being a Sunni organisation rather than a Shi’ite one.

The axis of resistance

The author notes that in February 1999, the Palestinian Authority police discovered documents that indicated a MOIS transfer of US$35 million to Hamas, allegedly to finance terrorist activities against Israeli targets. The setting up of its ‘axis of resistance’ – Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shi’ite militias in Iraq, and Assad’s Alawite dictatorship in Syria – was not only designed to hedge in Israel but also to be the first line of defence of the Islamic Republic.

Regardless of the political complexion of its government, Israel perceived the ayatollahs’ Iran to be an existential threat. It proceeded to take the shadow war to Iran itself. The Iranian regime had enough internal enemies who would willingly act to bring about an end to its unending repression.

The MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq) has long regarded itself as a rival of Khomeini’s regime. Self-defined as rooted in Islam but imbued with “revolutionary Marxism”, it had staged coups and uprisings in Iran. Designated by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union as a terrorist organisation in the late 1990s, MEK was fortuitously delisted during the past decade. The author attributes many of the attacks on the Iranian regime to the MEK.

Ward significantly notes that the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, “the father of the Iranian nuclear program,” in November 2020, was carried out on a rural road 40 miles outside Teheran – and was the work of a Mossad team comprising “more than 20 Israelis and Iranians.”

There are also Iranian ethnic groups, namely the Kurds, Arabs, and Sunni inhabitants of Baluchistan province, that have been victimised by the ayatollahs’ regime.

MOIS, often operating out of Iranian embassies, has been involved in abductions of opponents from the UAE, Turkey, and other states. Sometimes such operations have been farmed out to criminals, such as in the killing of Ahmad Mola Nissi in the Netherlands in 2017.

To achieve its ends, MOIS has employed Turkish crime bosses, Hell’s Angels in Canada, and those with expertise in setting honey traps.

The cyber domain has also been a battleground between Israel and Iran, which has employed operatives using the names “refined kitten”, “charming kitten”, and “remix kitten”. In 2020, there were Iranian cyber-attacks on Israel’s water facilities in response to an Israeli cyber-attack on Iranian fuel infrastructure.

While the FBI arrested dual national citizens who were surveilling Jewish centres in the US in 2018, a few years later five Iranian Jewish immigrants to Israel were discovered to be receiving funds from the Iranian regime. Their families in Iran received the payment, which was then transferred to them in Israel.

Gonen Segev, a one-time energy minister in Yitzhak Rabin’s government, remarkably fell from grace when it was revealed that he was smuggling ecstasy tablets from the Netherlands into Israel. He told police that he thought they were M&Ms!

Losing his medical licence, he then went to practise in Nigeria, where he was recruited by MOIS and travelled twice to Iran to meet his handlers. In February 2019, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

During the past couple of years, there has been closer cooperation between Russia and Iran. Both try to eliminate critics abroad and at home. The author argues that Russia helped Iran locate British-Iranian citizen Alireza Akbari, who was then accused of being a spy and was hanged last year.

Vladimir Putin visited Teheran a few months after the invasion of Ukraine – and Iran’s leaders fully support Russia. Since then, Iranian drones have been used to turn Ukrainian buildings into rubble. China has also signed an economic and defence agreement with Iran – and the author believes that Iran may have helped China uncover a CIA network in its country.

Ironically, the clerical regime’s approach is uncannily similar to that of Stalin’s devoutly atheistic dictatorship in eliminating opponents, real and imagined, in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.

The author omits the Israeli supply of arms to Khomeini at the beginning of the war with Iraq – this has been documented by several Israeli academics. Former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s government feared Saddam Hussein’s armies more than those of the Islamic Republic.

The connection between Iran and North Korea is also not mentioned.

However, this is an absorbing book because it is not peppered with clichés, slogans, or inflating denunciations. It is effective because it just presents the cold, hard facts. It is not a polemic. It gives outsiders a peek into a murky, subterranean world, removed from everyday life.

It is a good read. But even so, this account still leaves any reader with a sense of smoke and mirrors.

Dr Colin Shindler is Emeritus Professor and Pears Senior Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London, UK. He is also the founding chairman of the European Association of Israel Studies. © Jerusalem Post (jpost.org), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.